Written by Fani Sánchez
What are semi-generic keywords
Semi-generic keywords are terms with an average traffic potential and similar level of competition, whose optimization can bring significant levels of traffic to the portal.
Traffic potential is an indicator offered by some tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner, SEMRush or Sistrix, where we go to do our keyword consulting. Each of these tools evaluates on a scale and in a numerical way, the average number of searches that a certain keyword receives per month.
Purpose of keyword categorization
Keyword categorization serves a dual function:
- Determining your site’s generic keyword ceiling is an unequivocal starting point for effective keyword consulting, where resources are not wasted.
- By grouping words with similar characteristics or that share levels of architecture on the web (for example: long tail keywords could be blog tags, semi-generic keywords would be services…) we can monitor large-scale changes in rankings and determine if these are problems in a particular word group
Semi-generic words and web architecture
Generic keywords, as a general rule, are usually assigned to levels immediately below the home page, such as:
- Sections corresponding to the different services.
- Product categories or families (within the catalog of an online store).
- Information topics corresponding to sections of a media outlet.
- Categories of a blog
Let’s look at some practical cases:
- We have a chain of hotels in the province of Alicante. Our list of semi-generic keywords will be formed by the combination of hotel/s+Alicantean population: “Hotel in Elche”, “Hotels in Benidorm”, “Hotel in Denia” and so on for each city in which we have a hotel. It is also possible that we have a section that talks about the benefits of one or more of our hotels, so “hotel+feature” would be another keyword formula to position: “5 star hotels in Alicante”, “hotels near the sea”, “hotels with restaurant”, etc.
- We have an online marketing agency dedicated to SEO and PPC. Our semi-generic keywords will consist of as many services as we offer: “SEO campaign”, “search engine optimization company”, “pay per click agency”, “adwords agency”, “Adwords campaign”.
